


Chemistry

by LittleObsessions



Category: Addams Family - All Media Types
Genre: Assimilation, F/M, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Motherhood, Romance, Sexual Content, Sisterhood
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-25
Updated: 2020-08-28
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:48:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23319379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleObsessions/pseuds/LittleObsessions
Summary: "It occurred to her she was wildly outnumbered here, in the territory where a woman who was – while still in the process of finding her feet – much cleverer than any adversary Debbie had ever encountered."
Relationships: Fester Addams/Debbie Jellinsky, Gomez Addams/Morticia Addams
Comments: 17
Kudos: 109





	1. Chapter 1

So of course, in the most insane days and months I have ever experienced in my life, I turn to fanfiction. What am I writing? A chapter re-write of 'Addams Family Values' from a multi-perspective, feminist slant. Duh.

I love comments, I love kudos, I love follows and favourites. But most of all I just love writing. So thanks for reading.

* * *

"I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will."  
― **Charlotte Brontë,** **Jane Eyre**

* * *

**Wednesday**

Something is troubling you," her mother said, and Wednesday was not entirely shocked that her mother had said it. In the first instance it was true and in the second instance she was expecting this conversation, so surprise was not her first instinct.

However she was somewhat alarmed; she did not expect her mother to broach the subject so quickly, and that caught her on the backfoot.

She turned to look at her mother, the sharp lines of her face, the concern which ghosted across it for a mere moment before it vanished again, and wondered what she should say.

Myriad responses sprang to mind. Some of them pitifully childish, the theme of which was ripe envy at the amount of time her mother had been spending on her helpless infant brother.

And the other, more honest response that danced on the tip of her tongue - before she quelled it - was around the latest help in their home.

They were not unaccustomed to servants around their house; Lurch had been there from the moment she had been born (and would be eternally, she suspected), and they had drivers and maids and other staff on retainer.

It was not her communist leanings rearing their ugly head around Debbie's sudden ingratiation into the family, but rather every never standing on end every time she interacted with her.

There was something decidedly off about their white-wearing, zealously smiling, new nanny.

Wednesday would, under any other circumstances, have been immediately frank with her mother. But her mother was tired, and Wednesday was of an age where she understood it in a way she wouldn't have as a child. Under her mother's perfect make-up, her immaculate clothing, her calm composure, was a woman who was trying to balance all of the scales of her life.

"I am your mother, and you can share anything with me."

Wednesday set her book down and regarded her mother properly. She held her teacup between her pale fingers, perched delicately on the edge of the couch, her book resting in her lap, her eyes holding Wednesday's own.

There was something powerful in the way all of her interest was focussed on Wednesday.

Wednesday found it disconcerting and comforting all at once. It felt like a familiar piece of music she hadn't heard in a while but knew every note of.

She wondered, briefly, if father had volunteered to take the baby a walk and asked Pugsley for help just so that her mother could speak with her. Even the concept that it was premeditated filled Wednesday with an innocent warmth that wasn't entirely welcome in her skin.

She set her book aside and looked at her mother.

"You're an astute woman, mother," she said softly.

Her mother smiled her close-lipped smile and nodded almost imperceptibly.

"Surely you can see it?" Wednesday said, the words rushing out with a desperation she didn't entirely want to show. She sounded like a child, emphatic and desperate for approval.

Her mother motioned with a hand, beckoning her to sit on the seat beside her own. Wednesday climbed up from the floor beside the fire and took the seat she'd been directed to.

"You mean Miss Jelinksy?"

Her mother was not one to prevaricate in the face of any subject and it was – it occurred to Wednesday – a trait she was beginning to display herself. Her mother was watching her closely for her response, and Wednesday felt her next words must be chosen carefully in order to assert her argument.

"She is very-"

"Untrustworthy, calculating, too sweet to be wholesome?"

"Yes," Wednesday answered, then realising her mother truly understood, her voice coloured with passion. "Yes mother."

"Well," her mother took up her book again, as if acknowledging a traitor in their midst was a mere formality, "we're agreed."

Wednesday, still inflamed by the revelation, waited patiently for a plan, for a statement of intent. But it was not forthcoming.

"What will we do?" She felt close to bursting with anticipation and had to work very hard to keep her tone emotionless.

Her mother looked up, thoughtful, then shook her head softly.

"Nothing my darling."

If she had been taken aback by her mother's bland response, she was horrified by her willingness to simply let matters unfold.

"But she's going to kill my uncle, and possibly us…" Wednesday burst, her voice rising an octave as she laced her fingers together nervously.

Her mother smiled – small and just on the border of patronising – and then set her book to the side calmly, as if they were not in imminent danger.

"No, she won't," her mother said softly, as if it was entirely obvious and Wednesday was being woefully dense in having not understood that.

"How can you be sure?"

Her mother raised her brow, "I won't let her."

Wednesday was silent for a moment and mulled the threat over as her mother simply examined her with her unique brand of unsettling, yet maternal, scrutiny.

"What will you do?"

Her mother smiled again and for a moment a rare mischief almost curled the sides of her mouth and it both delighted and shocked Wednesday, for it seemed, to her, to be entirely new.

As quickly as it was there, it was gone.

"I haven't though that far ahead, if I am to be entirely honest with you my darling," her mother answered. "I have been somewhat occupied with the-"

"Birth of my brother," she interrupted, lambasting herself with silent scorn even as the words streamed out of her mouth.

Her mother reached out and brushed the hair which curved into the braid below her ear, tucking it neatly back in place as she'd always done for as long as Wednesday could remember. Wednesday felt powerless under her touch; safe, and longing, and loved and irritated all at once.

She was fourteen, she did not need babying (she could not remember a time she had) and yet here she was, craving it.

Perhaps that was why she was so unbearably – and uncharacteristically - furious all the time.

"It must be difficult," her mother said softly, toying with the tight weave of her braid. "I am sorry I haven't given time to that."

Her mother touched her face softly.

"I am not jealous-"

"You can confide in me, you know, and I will never be anything but supportive," her mother cut through her lies, like she cut through everything; gently, and with blistering precision. "And I expect you to be jealous, I suspect you should be. I think I would be."

Wednesday doubted that. Her mother, until this evening, have never seemed anything but completely level, and even then, she hadn't exactly been irrational tonight, just inexplicably calm.

"I just…I don't particularly enjoy change," she answered, trying to sound as sensible as possible. "I can't imagine you being jealous mother, you're not the jealous type."

Her mother looked serious for a moment, and a gentle smile chased the shadow from her face.

"I always find this part of being a mother the most challenging; that one must be a version of oneself, rather than the whole and – sometimes ugly - truth. Of course I have felt jealousy, and anger, and disappointment, and fear, and all the things you are feeling. Particular situations still excite them in me. But as a mother – as your mother – my job is to show you how to handle those things Wednesday, to be resilient in the face of them. And you have mistaken that for their absence."

"Maybe," Wednesday said, feeling braver in the face of her mother's candidness, "maybe you don't want me to see them."

Her trust in her mother was absolute, even if she didn't always understand her, and it was easy to offer something which could be interpreted as a criticism when she knew it wouldn't be read that way.

"You may have a point," her mother said. "Emotional intimacy is not my strength."

Wednesday knew, of course, that wasn't strictly true.

There was one person who knew her mother as well as person could be known.

"I don't want more of your time," Wednesday said, suddenly feeling guilty as she realised she was adding another burden to her mother.

"I think it's what you need...and what I need, all things considered," her mother smiled, with an air of reassurance so absolute that any other argument Wednesday may have made for the sake of saving face seemed pointless. She merely nodded, and allowed her mother to pull her into her embrace.

"Don't worry about Miss Jelinsky," her mother murmured softly, "leave that to me. Heaven knows you've enough to worry-"

The door of the parlour opened, heralding an intruder, and they broke from their embrace to examine who it was.

It was her father, with the baby, who was wriggling impatiently, and from the apologetic look on her father's face she suspected that he had been unsettled for quite a while.

"He is hungry Tish," her father said softly, tucking the baby into one arm while he shrugged off his coat onto the chair with the other.

Her mother had already begun untying her robe even before her father had spoken. He brought the baby forward, and as soon as he was latched his wriggling frenzy stopped and he settled into her mother's arms peacefully.

"Was your walk lovely?" Her mother asked the baby, as she gently stoked his cheek. "Your father is a fine tour guide for the cemetery."

"A pale imitation of you Tish."

Her father turned and smiled at her after his eyes lingered on his wife a moment longer. His mouth was a grin of satisfaction, decorated with tiredness, and was soon the owner of a glowing cigar.

"How is my little hellion, my Wednesday?"

"Fine, thank you," she stood. "Excuse me. I have studying."

"We could finish our conversation," her mother said. "You don't have to leave."

Wednesday was genuinely happy to go; she wasn't making a show of her own exit in order to imply she was intruding. So, she shook her head.

"I really do have to study," she said softly, making a poor attempt at a reassuring smile. "I promise."

"Alright," her mother said, but Wednesday could see her incredulity for a second before her face was a mask of regal composure.

Wednesday bent to look at the baby, resisting various urges to show it who was boss. And instead she smiled and just as the baby caught her eye, he began to sob.

A gentle heat filled her chest and she was forced to reconsider the entire concept of ridding their home of the baby.

And when she made eye contact with her mother, there was something that looked like pride in her mother's black eyes.


	2. Chapter 2

**Morticia**

“Read to me,” she ordered gently, closing her eyes and turning her face into his side.

If exhaustion had robbed her of her desire to read, she was damned if she didn’t at least live vicariously through her husband.

He chuckled quietly, and hummed his assent before beginning:

“And here comes in the question whether it is better to be loved rather than feared or feared rather than loved. It might perhaps be answered that we should wish to be both; but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.”

The fluent, delicious ease with which he read Italian subdued her over-busy brain for a moment, but the particular suitability of the extract he had read would not stop biting at her, as it always did when she came across it.

“That passage always reminds me of Wednesday,” she said, her voice muffled as she pressed her face into his hip. 

He set his book to the side and touched her shoulder, encouraging her to raise herself up and nearer to him.

“I fear I interrupted something rather serious earlier. Or, rather, the baby did.”

She adjusted, setting her head in his lap, enjoying the gentle motion of him tracing his fingers over her hair. There was something politely romantic about it, and she indulged him for a moment.

“She’s terrified of vulnerability, of being-“

“She hardly inherited that from an unrecognisable source,” he interrupted.

She laughed gently and shook her head.

“Yes but she’s so…” she paused, the words feeling insufficient, “so angry and so determined to be independent.”

“Teenage angst, my love,” he assured.

“It’s more than that, certainly more,” she answered, feeling the weight of having a threat in their midst that she was yet to decide how to manage.

“How can I be of assistance?”

She turned around and, sitting up, came face to face with him. She wasn’t yet prepared to trouble Gomez with her suspicious around Miss Jelinskey, though at some point she would have to. There was finally some calm in their home again, some spectre of the life before their new-born son, and it seemed unfair to derail that in the absence of anything but an inkling. And anyway, in the longed-for peace, she was hardly going to let this rare opportunity – a quiet evening alone with her husband - slide through her fingers.

“Mon cher,” she raked her nails gently across his cheek, mesmerised as he shuddered under her touch, “your mere presence is enough assistance.”

“I have missed you Tish,” he said softy, eyes black with the kind of desire that had been – by sheer necessity of circumstance – absent in the last few weeks.

“I have been right here all along,” she said and, with a coy smile, began unbuttoning her night gown, enjoying the hunger in his eyes as he watched, still and enthralled. She began to raise it over her thighs, wondering when he would finally give into temptation.

“You know exactly what I mean,” he murmured, hand reaching out to caress her, but stalling in mid-air.

“Touch me,” she demanded, voice losing all coyness, as she straddled his hips.

He needed no more encouragement, but she was impressed by his self-restraint when he opted to cup her jaw in his hands and bring her mouth down to his. 

In the easy, quiet intimacy they shared she was able to fully relax, losing all sense of time and its limitations. 

He grinned against her mouth as she sighed, her body softening into his, and he took the opportunity to switch their positions, so she was underneath him.

His kiss was slow and deliberately reserved, and his hands remained on her shoulders. It was bewildering, even now, how his kiss could silence any and every question she had, that his mouth could whisper the very essence of love into her skin. How his kiss could drive her wild with an abandon even she wasn’t entirely comfortable displaying.

Heat grew in her belly and she pushed her pelvis into his with an encouraging groan.

He chuckled a little and pulled back from her, to look at her face.

“I intend to savour every moment of this,” he murmured, before trailing his lips down her neck.

“Are you implying something of deprivation? Because you’re forgetting numerous fleeting altercations, not least of all my very accommodating mouth.” She whispered, twisting his hair in her fingers as his lips laid out a hot-trail along her sternum and his hands pushed her nightgown towards her waist.

“I will never be ungrateful, I have no right,” he said, raising his eyes up to look at her as she pressed her pelvis up towards him. “And for clarification I have not forgotten any of our altercations, however fleeting they may have been. Take it as the compliment it’s intended to be that I want to taste every inch of you…in spite of your impatience.”

He was right, of course, but she would perish before she admitted that.

He kneeled up, and began divesting himself of his pyjama shirt, pulling it up over his head to reveal his hewn chest. Though she wasn’t entirely vocal about it, she was not at all immune to the aesthetic pleasures of his body – in fact quite the opposite. She admired the ripple of his pecs as he pulled his shirt and threw it on the floor, and she was suddenly thirsty to taste him. Sitting up to join him on his knees, she reached forward to kiss his abdomen, tasting the clean earthiness of his skin, and she couldn’t resist the temptation to scrape her teeth over his nipple as she moved upwards. When she finally looked up into his eyes, she was met with amusement.

“It isn’t all one sided,” he grinned, satisfied.

“Let’s not shatter any illusions now,” she murmured, resting back on her heels. “I like the status quo.”

She reached down to finish the painfully slow journey of her night gown, trailing it up over her own thighs and, knowing his eyes were riveted to her movements, lay back, spreading her legs open on their black sheets.

Suggestiveness was shattered in the face of explicit encouragement.

And he grinned with delighted when she raised a challenging brow.


	3. Chapter 3

**Debbie**

Debbie knew envy in all its guises; she was a very paragon of the emotion, and she lived with it like a silent spectre. At first it had haunted her, driven her to do things she may once have considered terrible, and now those things were just a series of links in the chain of surviving a life that hadn’t given her what she deserved.

Maybe they were still terrible, in an abstract way, but she kept the reality of that at a distance she could manage while simultaneously acknowledging the likelihood of her burning for all eternity was highly likely.

The longer she stayed here, though, the more the envy seemed to be gnawing at her bones.

And it was a different envy to anything she had known prior to this.

One day, early on, as she leafed listlessly through a chunky ledger she’d come across in the bottom of Gomez’s desk in the study – having quite astutely established that there was no way she was ever going to entice him – it occurred to her that the pursuit of wealth was starting to feel…well…toothless.

And she suspected, suddenly, that her search had been confused for a very long time. That money, and belonging, and happiness, had gotten tangled up all in one, and she had been so busy cleaning blood and plotting violent deaths that she hadn’t noticed.

They were out for the afternoon – the family – and Lurch was ensconced in his room in the belfry, and Debbie had a goal that was not necessarily tied to her original plan in marrying Fester, but one that felt necessary, nonetheless. There had been a subtle shift in the lady of the house that Debbie had noticed gradually; over the long, languorous dinners they all spent round the table and her low, rhapsodical voice would captivate her husband and soothe her children; in the cool evenings when she would glide silently through the house, sweeping calm behind her; in the mornings when she would scoop up the baby and hold him as she floated round her conservatory, naming each plant – one more monstrous than the other -; and in the way one look at her husband could tell him something that made Debbie’s skin crawl with want.

It was as if Mrs Addams was re-emerging from something, as if she had been absent and, in her absence, her family had been rudderless, and somehow, they were grateful of the rhythm she was re-establishing. And Debbie, though she’d never experienced it herself, suspected the change had been thanks to the initial horror of motherhood, and that all of the other people in the house had been waiting on her to come back; impatient for her return, silent but desperate in the face of the shifting dynamic a new baby brought about.

It made Debbie uneasy, because she knew women like Morticia Addams and she was starting to wonder if she’d bitten off more than she could chew.

Then again, she enjoyed the cut and thrust of a spar with a worthy opponent.

So she found herself standing on the threshold of the master bedroom, her white Maryjanes hesitating before she stepped into the silent room.

She squinted in the half-dark, and her fingers crawled along the wall to find the brass dimmer. She kept the lights on their lowest setting for fear of disturbing a sanctity she didn’t quite understand, any more than she already had.

In the weeks she had stayed in this house – this house which creaked and moaned and shifted and seemed to be as alive as any of the rest of them – she had never once ventured into this wing, never mind strolled to the end of the long corridor and found herself in this room.

It had been made implicitly clear that she was not to go there, so naturally her curiosity was piqued to a degree where she couldn’t resist the temptation.

The cavernous bed – a dark, four poster of gigantic proportions, mahogany ornate with carvings that, when examined closely, took a lot of stomach to analyse – dominated the room.

And Debbie expected nothing less.

She dragged her fingers over the inky silk of the sheets, over the twisting columns of wood holding up the dark red velvet curtains.

Envy welled up inside her as her hands trailed over the smooth material, and she stared a moment at her own pale hand against the blood-red material before turning to the bedside table and pulling the drawer open.

It was unsurprisingly sparse and tidy, save for an old book, a chequebook and a riding crop that had seen better days. Debbie thought better of it before examining that, but she did lift the book and examine it. It was a copy of _Wuthering Heights_ , and Debbie remembered vaguely that she should have studied it in high school but that she was too busy pursuing most of the football team to remember what it was about.

The first page bore an inscription in looping, dramatic handwriting; “I would be your slave.”

She didn’t need to read who had written it.

She snapped the book shut abruptly, as if it had bitten her, and set it back in the drawer with a slam.

She turned then, suddenly conscious of the silence, and walked to a door at the far end of the chamber and, upon pushing it open, promptly realised it was Mrs. Addams’ dressing room. it was surprisingly decadent, and it revealed something that Debbie had already guessed at; that this was a woman who kept her secrets very close to her heart.

The dressing table, though neat, revealed more than even Debbie had suspected it would. It told her the woman who was very quickly threatening Debbie’s scheming conducted the vast majority of her private life from here; a private phone line, an address book, stockings hung carelessly over the mirror, a fountain pen left lying open across a letter to an old friend, signed ‘Yours, Tish.’

Debbie paused for a moment, fingers fluttering over the glass vials and bottles and tubes of lipstick, over a ruby necklace that had to be worth more than a year’s grifting, over an obscene note scrawled on a napkin from Harry’s bar about exactly what Mr Addams planned to do, before catching a glimpse of herself in the glass.

She was disappointed to see longing on her own face, disappointed to find herself wanting, when she thought she had it quite neatly figured out. She stared for a moment longer and wondered what it would be like to just stop, to find something that resembled contentment. Before reminding herself that it didn’t exist.

She turned to examine the rest of the room, eyes flittering enviously over numerous red-soled stilettoes, over the mink fur coat left out for airing, over thin silk slips and even thinner silk nightgowns.

Her fingers were tempted to test the towering series of drawers set against the wall, but the rattling of their locks unsettled her, and she didn’t pursue it any further.

Glancing around once more, she caught a glimpse of her full-self in the armoire mirror and stood motionless – the only white in a sea of black velvets. Irony bit at her for a moment before she dismissed it. 

It occurred to her she was wildly outnumbered here, in the territory where a woman who was – while still in the process of finding her feet – much cleverer than any adversary Debbie had ever encountered.

She began to feel, suddenly, as if she was being watched. Terror filled her almost instantly and slamming the door of the dressing room behind her she began to run, making sure to close all the doors and go as swiftly back the way she came.

That night, while she retired to the drawing room to read after dinner – an activity she pretended to enjoy because it seemed to appeal to Fester – Fester joined her after a few minutes; snivelling, anxious to please.

“Can I make you a drink?” He asked, already fussing at the cocktail tray on the sideboard.

“A Sidecar,” she lifted her eyes away from _Wuthering Heights_ , an acquisition from the house’s imposing library because it had been scratching at her like an itch that just wouldn’t die, and smiled softly.

He grinned and set about making the cocktail, and she had to admit that he wasn’t terrible at cocktail mixing.

He seemed to have an affinity for chemistry.

“How was your day?” He asked softly as he brought her drink to her, and she dutifully put the book to the side and smiled gratefully as she took the drink he offered.

“Boring,” she lied, because ‘unsettling’ wouldn’t be an appropriate answer, “How was yours?”

“Busy.”

The silence was not comfortable, but it wasn’t awkward either and she was surprised to discover this as they sat companionably, side by side, on the couch.

She sipped on her drink, then couldn’t resist;

“How long has Mrs Addams been your sister-in-law?”

He seemed surprised by the question, as if she should – by dint of living in the house – know the answer, but then his face grew clouded.

“I wasn’t here for their wedding. It was a rather quiet affair, by all accounts.”

“Oh?”

“Mmmm,” he nods. “I was…missing in action. They’ve been married fifteen years I think. They make a point of taking a trip for their anniversary every year. Berlin last year, Moscow before that…”

Unmistakeable wistfulness flittered across his face, and she suddenly feels a kinship with him that she is absolutely opposed to feeling. She recognises it as the same emotion she caught in Morticia’s mirror that morning; longing.

“You get envious?”

He shakes his head instantly, and she knows the denial to be genuine.

“Envy isn’t the right thing to explain it,” he shrugged and then laughed it off from behind his own drink.

“She’s in charge,” she said softly, watching the fire crackle in the hearth.

It became blindingly apparent, as she vocalised it, why it tormented her so much.

She might be married, she might even have three brattish children who seemed to consume so much of her time, but Mrs Addams was still very much the architect of her own destiny. That much had been apparent through the skin-tight dresses, the quietly given directions, the breathless French and the prickling thorns…and the way she carried herself like the world should throw itself at her feet.

Debbie had just been blind to it.

He merely laughed and leaned in, and for the first time she saw a glint of something that might be considered attractive: perverted delight.

“All good Addams women are.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Wednesday**

“You can be Wednesday’s lab partner, though she likes experimenting on them…so just be vigilant. Apart from that, she knows more than I do.”

It was a rare treat when Mr. Erickson deadpanned this to a new Chemistry partner, because the reaction from the intended partner elicited the kind of joy in Wednesday that few things did.

She wouldn’t dream of showing that though.

But this boy barely flinched, and she was mortally wounded when he simply turned on heel and made towards the vacant space at her bench. He did put out a hand though, and she was forced to look up.

“Joel,” he murmured lowly, before scraping the stool out and settling down.

“Wednesday Addams,” she responded, because it was polite and appropriate and she hadn’t been raised in a barn.

“I just moved here,” he volunteered, as if she had asked or as if she was interested. “Father has a new job, and so I had to up sticks…again.”

The bitterness in his voice was so thick she could taste it, and it made his pale face beautiful with a rage which almost took Wednesday’s breath away.

For the first time in her life she found herself shocked, and a little disorientated. And she hated it instantly.

“It’s a day until summer vacation, why come to school?” She asked, as if her entire world hadn’t just suddenly tilted on its axis and thrown off all the things she once considered important.

“To prove a point.”

He pulled their instructions towards them and pushed it away again after a moment. “I did this successfully when I was six.”

She resisted the smile pulling at her lips, “Me too. With my father. In our dining room. The first attempt burnt a hole in one of my mother’s favourite tapestries. Daddy paid for that one.”

“Your parents let you do things like this in your house?”

It was his turn to be impressed.

She nodded, happier to find herself on a level playing field now. For a moment, she had been rather out of sorts.

There was a silence before he spoke again. 

“How do you entertain yourself around here in summer?”

She looked up at him, “Mostly trying to kill my little brother – brothers - …and reading.”

He flashed his white teeth in a snarling smile, “Both admirable pursuits. Brothers?”

“Two,” she sighed, “One’s a recent addition. I’m still measuring him up.”

He nodded, impressed, and then pulled at his navy blazer.

“These uniforms suck.”

She stuck her rebellious, non-regulation booted foot out from under the bench, “I try.”

He laughed and they were silent for a moment as Mr Erickson wandered past, choosing to ignore the fact that they were blatantly not setting up the experiment. It was amazing what her parents’ sizeable contributions as members of the board had done to lessen the criticism she took for refusing to follow a poorly designed curriculum.

Her chemistry partner let out a sigh before he quickly said; “I’m off to the movies tonight. ‘Freaks’ is showing at the cinema on 48th.”

She eyed him for a moment.

“I screened that at my fifth birthday.”

“It’s a classic,” he agreed.

“One of my father’s cousins was an extra on that film,” she informed, then added, “I would be happy to join you.”

He smiled with something that looked like relief before composing himself.

“That would be lovely.”

-0-

It wasn’t going to be lovely, not least of all because Wednesday wished she had never agreed to meet him. Plus, ‘lovely’ was a word that made her skin crawl; pedestrian, vague, noncommittal, milky language.

What, she asked herself, as she paced back and forth in front of her desk, had possessed her? 

Stupidity, she answered herself, blind stupidity at having been swept away in the moment.

She pulled back her sheets and was about to crawl into her bed and sob her fury into the pillow, when there was a knock at her bedroom door. She jumped, hastily smoothing the sheets back onto the bed.

“Come in mother,” she said, knowing the soft, patient knock anywhere, trying to school her voice into something resembling calm.

“Hello,” her mother’s eyes drifted towards the pile of dresses – each black, each only marginally different – abandoned haphazardly on the floor, then back to her.

“Your father tells me you asked Lurch for the car tonight?”

She nodded, staying silent, because to talk was to incriminate oneself. At any rate she had decided that she wouldn’t be going to meet her new lab partner at all, and that after the summer vacation was over, she would ignore him as if she’d never suggested she would join him at the cinema.

“He’s mistaken,” she murmured, moving to begin tidying up the dresses. Her resolve failed her, and she turned back and sank onto the end of her bed and leaned against the wall.

“Curious,” her mother came fully into the room, closing the door behind her. “He seemed certain. And Lurch is quick; he doesn’t usually make mistakes.”

She looked up at her mother, and then sighed.

“I was supposed to be going out, I am not anymore.”

“May I ask why?” Her mother settled her rear against the desk at the far wall.

Wednesday bit her lip, swallowed the fury that was eating away at her.

“Because…” the answer disappeared into her absolute inability to articulate her own weakness.

“Because,” her mother moved towards her bed and sat down beside her, “it involves la petit ami.”

“Something like that,” Wednesday groaned.

“Am I going to have to guess at every detail?” Her mother asked, taking Marie Antoinette between her hands and smoothing the doll’s dress into place.

Wednesday remained defiantly silent.

“I suspect you like this person, a great deal, and that makes you vulnerable-“

“What if I can’t manage it?”

Her mother smiled a little but spared her the humiliation of looking her in the eye.

“You are an Addams; you can manage anything. It is hugely impolite to stand anyone up, so you have to make your apologies, or you have to go. What’s their name?”

“Joel.”

“Well, are we telephoning Joel or are we choosing a dress?”

  
Her mother stood and offered her hand.

“Dress.”

“Good choice.”


End file.
